In the advertising, service bureau, and pre-press industry, we used Jaz 1GB and 2GB disks from clients for either adding or retrieving original-resolution digital scans of images being used in their print or web collateral. From a service bureau angle, we would put the high-res drum scans of a large format film transparency onto Jaz disks because they were generally too large for Zip disks. Their sizes were often in the hundreds of MB, and there might be several images from (or for) that client, resulting in the use of one or more Jaz disks for a particular job.
For a client which put out weekly circulars in the local newspaper (think of a supermarket or a Wal-Mart-type flyer insert), Jaz disks for a time were indispensable for this use: we’d often receive high-res originals from a photographer (then using early digital SLRs like the Kodak DCS system, matched to a Nikon or Canon body), from which our task was to not only touch up white balance and colour to client specs, but also creating clipping paths around the product or model so that those could be placed into the flyer layout using QuarkXPress or InDesign.
Eventually, online networks got faster and fewer film transparencies were being shot (resulting in fewer high-resolution drum scans being made), so more of everything began life as a digital file on a remote FTP server and the need for the “sneakernet” (transporting data physically, “on foot”), à la Jaz, Zip, CD-RW/DVD-RW, and even SyQuest disks, were no longer necessary.
Although I could only budget for the Yikes! G4 in ’99, one add-on I positively could not skimp on due to my job was springing for the Zip drive. Apple did a fantastic job with the Zip bezel, and the drive always worked as intended.
